Thorpe lab

About

Who we are...

We are a research laboratory located in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences at Queen Mary University of London.

What we do...

We perform research to understand the regulation of cell division. Cell division is the process that creates new cells to replace aged or damaged tissues in our body, however, uncontrolled cell division is the defining characteristic of cancer. We aim to determine how cell division is regulated to allow us to control this process. The ultimate aim is to be able to regulate cell division as a treatment for cancer and to promote cell division of stem cells for regenerative medicine.

A central hypothesis to our work is that the position of proteins within the cell controls cell division. We place normal proteins in different locations within the cell, next to new partner proteins, and test the effect upon cell division. Some of the resulting changes promote cell division, while others block it. We then use this knowledge to both understand how the normal process of cell division is controlled and furthermore to understand how it may be manipulated, for example in cancer therapy.

We principally use baker's yeast since this has a number of key advantages over human cells.

The yeast genes controlling cell division are essentially the same as human cells.
The yeast regulatory networks contain less redundancy and are therefore simpler to understand.
Experiments in yeast save both time and money compared with cultured human cells.
Yeast divide asymmetrically, like many human cells, providing a model to study how cells acquire different fates.

Using yeast as a tool we aim to elucidate methods to regulate human cell division.

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News

December 2024 - Congratulations to Grace (Herdge Thomas) - who graduated with her doctorate today. Now officially Dr. Heredge Thomas.

October 2024 - Congratulations to Cinzia, Guðjon, Henry and Caitlin - whose manuscript was accepted for publication in Nucleus.

September 2024 - Welcome to Amina and Joshua, who join the lab for their Master’s projects.

September 2024 - Welcome to Ayah and Spencer who join the lab for their undergraduate research projects.

July 2024 - Congratulations to Fozia who successfully defended her PhD thesis.

May 2024 - Congratulations to Caitlin, who presented her work at the Roscoff cell cycle meeting.

April 2024 - Congratulations to Alexander, Ieva and Rishi who completed their undergraduate research projects.

February 2024 - Congratulations to Silvia et al. for their manuscript published in Nature Communications.

Interested in working in our lab?

When funded positions become available, we advertise these jobs or studentships locally and nationally.

Students or graduates wishing to undertake projects in the lab for which they have, or wish to apply for, funding should contact Peter.

Unfortunately, as we have limited space and consumable resources, therefore we are unable to offer lab experience placements or interns that are not funded.

Publications

2024 Klemm, C., Ólafsson, G., Wood, R.H., Mellor, C., Zabet, N.R. and Thorpe, P.H. Proteome-wide forced interactions reveal a functional map of cell-cycle phospho-regulation in S. cerevisiae. Nucleus 15, 2420129.
2024 Peripolli, S., Meneguello, L., Perrod, C., Singh, T., Patel, H., Rahman, S.T., Kiso, K., Thorpe, P., Calvanese, V., Bertoli, C., de Bruin, R.A.M. Oncogenic c-Myc induces replication stress by increasing cohesins chromatin occupancy in a CTCF-dependent manner. Nat. Commun. 15, 1579.
2023 Mishra, P.K., Au W-C., Castineira, P.G., Ali, N., Stanton, J., Boeckmann, L., Takahashi, Y., Costanzo, M., Boone, C., Bloom, K.S., Thorpe, P.H. and Basrai, M.A. Misregulation of cell cycle dependent methylation of budding yeast CENP-A contributes to chromosomal instability. Mol. Biol. Cell. 34. ar99 1-15. (Highlighted article)
2022 Nitika, Zheng, B., Ruan, L., Kline, J.T., Omkar, S., Sikora, J., Texeira Torres, M., Wang, Y., Takakuwa, J.E., Huguet, R., Klemm, C., Segarra, V.A., Winters, M.J., Pryciak, P.M., Thorpe, P.H., Tatebayashi, K., Li, R., Fornelli, L. and Truman, A.W. Comprehensive characterization of the Hsp70 interactome reveals novel client proteins and interactions mediated by posttranslational modifications. PLoS Biology 20, e3001839.
2022 Klemm, C., Howell, R.S.M. and Thorpe, P.H. ScreenGarden: a shinyR application for fast and easy analysis of plate-based high-throughput screens. BMC Bioinformatics 23. 60.
2021 Klemm, C., Wood, H., Heredge Thomas, G., Ólafsson, G., Torres, M.T. and Thorpe, P.H. Forced association of SARS-CoV-2 proteins with the yeast proteome perturb vesicle trafficking. Microbial Cell 8, 280-296. Highlighted in this commentary.
2021 Mishra, P.K., Wood, H., Stanton, J., Au, W-C., Eisenstatt, J.R., Boeckmann, L., Sclafani, R.A., Weinreich, M., Bloom, K.S., Thorpe, P.H. and Basrai, M.A. Cdc7-mediated phosphorylation of Cse4 regulates high-fidelity chromosome segregation in yeast. Mol. Biol. Cell. 32, ar15 1-13 . (Highlighted article)
2021 Klemm, C., Thorpe, P.H. and Ólafsson, G. Cell-cycle phospho-regulation of the kinetochore. Current Genetics 67, 177-193.
2020 Howell, R.S.M., Klemm, C., Thorpe, P.H. and Csikász-Nagy, A. Unifying the mechanism of mitotic exit control in a spatio-termporal logical model. PLoS Biology 18, e3000917.
2020 Herrero, E., Stinus, S., Bellows, E., Berry, L.K., Wood, H. and Thorpe P.H. Asymmetric transcription factor partitioning during yeast cell division requires the FACT chromatin remodeler and cell cycle progression. Genetics 216, 701-716. (Highlighted article and cover image)
2020 Ólafsson, G. and Thorpe P.H. Polo kinase recruitment via the constitutive centromere-associated network at the kinetochore elevates centromeric RNA. PLoS Genetics 16, e1008990.
2020 Berry, L.K., Heredge Thomas, G. and Thorpe, P.H. CATS: Cas9-assisted tag switching. A high-throughput method for exchanging genomic peptide tags in yeast. BMC Genomics 21, 221.
2019 Howell, R.S.M., Csikász-Nagy, A. and Thorpe, P.H. Synthetic Physical Interactions with the yeast centrosome. Genes Genomes Genetics 9, 2183-2194. (Featured Article included in 2019 Spotlight, A showcase of research and scholarship in selected articles).
2019 Mishra, P.K., Ólafsson, G., Boeckmann, L., Westlake, T.J., Jowhar, Z.M., Dittman, L.E., Baker, R.E., D'Amours, D., Thorpe, P.H., and Basrai, M.A. Cell cycle dependent association of polo kinase Cdc5 with CENP-A contributes to faithful chromosome segregation in budding yeast. Mol. Biol. Cell 30, 1020-1036.
2019 Guo, W., Kumar, S., Gorlitz, F., Garcia, E., Alexandrov, Y., Munro, I., Kelly, D., Warren, S., Thorpe, P., Dunsby, C. and French, P. Automated Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging High-Content Analysis of Förster Resonance Energy Transfer between Endogenously Labeled Kinetochore Proteins in Live Budding Yeast Cells. SLAS Technology 24, 308-320.
2018 Ólafsson, G. and Thorpe P.H. Rewiring the budding yeast proteome using synthetic physical interactions. Methods Mol. Biol. 1672, 599-612.
2016 Ledesma-Fernández, E., Thorpe P.H., de Bruin, R.A.M. Bringing Functional Genomics into Focus. Cell Systems 3, 214-216.
2016 Ólafsson, G. and Thorpe P.H. Synthetic Physical Interactions Map Kinetochore-Checkpoint Activation Regions. Genes Genomes Genetics 6, 2531-2542.
2016 Berry, L., Ólafsson, G., Ledesma-Fernández, E. and Thorpe P.H. Synthetic protein interactions reveal a functional map of the cell. eLife 5, e13053.
2016 Herrero E. and Thorpe P.H. Synergistic control of kinetochore protein levels by Psh1 and Ubr2. PLoS Genetics 12, e1005855.
2015 Ólafsson, G. and Thorpe P.H. Synthetic physical interactions map kinetochore regulators and regions sensitive to constitutive Cdc14 localization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 112, 10413-10418 . (Direct Submission)

[ALL PUBLICATIONS]

Funding

Our research is, or has recently been, funded by the following organisations. Without their support our work would not be possible.

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council

Contact

Our location

School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
Fogg Building
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS

Nearest tube stations are Stepney Green (District line/Hammersmith & City Line) and Mile End (District line/Hammersmith & City Line / Central line).

E-mail enquires to Peter

G.E. Fogg building

glory.into.galaxy (What3words address)